Chicago Teachers Union and schools 'agree in principle' to end strike

The Chicago Teachers Union and the third largest school district in the US has
reached an "agreement in principle" to end a five-day strike over
education reforms, raising hopes teachers will be back in class this Monday.

Striking Chicago public school teachers and their supporters rally following a march down Michigan Avenue, 13th SeptemberPhoto: GETTY

9:32AM BST 15 Sep 2012

More than 350,000 Chicago students marked a week off classes on Friday after some 29,000 Chicago teachers and support staff walked off the job over the education reforms.

The union's house of delegates, a larger consultative body than the negotiating team, was meeting on Friday afternoon to discuss the state of negotiations. It was not clear if they would vote on the agreement in principle.

The school district said the framework would first have to be approved by the union's delegates and then go to the full membership before it was final.

The teachers walked out on Monday in the first Chicago Teachers Union strike since 1987. It was the largest strike in the United States in a year and has galvanised the labour movement and exposed a rift within the Democratic Party over reforms of urban schools.

The high-profile clash in Barack Obama's home city has been awkward for the President. Rahm Emanuel, the mayor of Chicago, is Mr Obama's former White House Chief of Staff and a key fundraiser for the president's re-election campaign. Unions are a key constituency of the Democratic Party and will be important in getting out the vote on Nov. 6.

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Teachers revolted when Mr Emanuel, with support from a national school reform movement largely financed by wealthy philanthropists, tried to pin much of teacher evaluations to students' performance on standardised tests in areas such as reading and math.

The union argues that the policy forces them to teach to the test and narrows the curriculum. Chicago teachers also said they should not be evaluated on factors outside their control such as poverty and crime, which their students endure in some neighbourhoods.

Mr Emanuel has retreated on his teacher evaluation demands, agreeing to phase in new standards and lowering the percentage weighting of standardised tests.

Meanwhile a judge in Wisconsin on Friday struck down a law championed by Republican Governor Scott Walker that effectively took away all collective bargaining rights for most public workers, which provoked widespread public protests by unions across America. The law had been in effect for nearly a year.